This week in PR (8 March newsletter) - the social media issue

World Book Day; International Women’s Day; the Budget - there have been plenty of talking points this week.

But one main theme stands out for me from the 39 content links I’ve gathered for #ThisWeekinPR.

Diminishing returns from social media

It's been a long time since we were celebrating the emergence of social media as the ultimate free and unmediated channel for communication and for community building. That was before the platforms started extracting fees for reaching audiences and before algorithms turned the social media experience into a shouting match.

If you don’t share such a long memory, let me spell it out. The year was 2008 and the professional excitement around social media (that meant blogging back then) was so great that Edelman was willing to generously fund an academic and practitioner conference in Brussels, flying in experts including The Cluetrain Manifesto co-author David Weinberger from Harvard University.

I recall meeting a young delegate from Portugal clutching a copy of the newly-published book Here Comes Everybody by Clay Shirky at that conference. He was Bruno Amaral and that book and that conference marked the high water mark of social media optimism. What could possibly go wrong?

I’ve not met Bruno in person since but to give credit where it’s due I have kept in contact through social media. And his newsletter is one that's worth reading (no one talks much about blogging these days - the Brussels conference went by the ugly name of Euroblog - but everyone who’s anyone has a newsletter instead).

This week he’s picked up on an important theme: the ‘enshittification’ of social media in Cory Doctorow’s language, and as reported in the Financial Times. If you need me to spell this out, then X/Twitter is a good example of this process of ‘enshittification’.

Bruno Amaral describes how he’s now cautious about bestowing likes on social media content, setting his desire to thank the author against his wish to deny the algorithm the data to feed him more of the same. But it’s not just personal; it’s professional. He writes:

As Communication Professionals we need to take accountability for the communication instruments we build and the platforms we build them on. We are the ones advising clients, they come to us for sustainable results and not to be at the mercy of the whims and pitfalls of social media. And I realise that most of the time we have to dismantle their fascination for the promise of quick results from a social media campaign. Social Media channels can be a part of an overall strategy, but their goal should be to amplify the message and not be the single point of failure for our plan.

It’s not working anymore. We can no longer rely on social media. So how do we practise PR post-social-media?

Dan Slee recommends gathering evidence firsthand through a social media review with the goal of demonstrating the level of engagement achieved through social media.

I pick a seven day window to review the content. I’m keen to see how much engagement there is. As it’s social media this is the killer metric to see how well the content is landing. Adobe did some good research about what good looks like in engagement terms. For X, formerly Twitter, it's now quite low. For LinkedIn it's as high as 6 per cent compared to follower numbers.

The once-open public sphere of blogs and social media is becoming a series of private communities and networks: where once we commented on social media, now we’re sharing our thoughts on WhatsApp. Where once we hoped people might subscribe to our blogging content through RSS newsreaders, we’re now encouraging them to sign up for our email newsletter. Where once we built communities in public, we’re now doing so in private through the likes of Guild or Discord.

It’s still social, but it’s not in public which does pose a problem for a practice that has for long been known as public relations.

But how to respond to this fractious and confrontational public sphere? To riff off The Cluetrain Manifesto, are you sure you want to join the conversation? How will you even get heard?

Many are turning away for personal and for professional reasons. Some are espousing a calmer approach; silence even in the case of Emma Duke; eyes and ears first for Chris Taylor; listening for Mike Pounsford, Kevin Ruck and Howard Krais.

Crisis expert Amanda Coleman has produced an updated report on how to communicate in a power outage. Think about it: no power means no internet, no printouts even. What are your options? Who is investing in pigeon lofts in case of emergency? Where are the calligraphers ready to produce elegant text by hand? Where are the old style printing presses?

Yet for most of the past century public relations functioned smoothly using the communication technology of the day: the telephone network, documentary film; the postal service, print publications. We’ve forgotten about morse code, telex and telegrams, but fax machines were ubiquitous and seemed a tremendous step forward in real-time communication over distance.

As we discussed last week, technology is not always the answer. As a last attention-seeking ploy, you can always propose floating something down the Thames. This week James Herring has confessed to practising the oldest trick in the publicist’s playbook. Yet:

The industry needs to set sights higher, to innovate not just in scale but in significance, to float not just objects down a river, but epic ideas that ripple through the collective consciousness long after the spectacle has passed. In the ever-evolving landscape of brand communications and to negate the widespread consumer indifference to most forms of marketing – originality is not just a virtue but a necessity.

Creativity and not just copying is key to our future success. Which seems to rule out so much AI generated content too; a discussion for another day.